Author & Translator Event:
Kaori Fujino and Kendall Heitzman
Wednesday, April 24th 6:00pm~
At Kinokuniya New York
Partnered with the Japan Foundation New York and the University of Iowa’s Center for Asian and Pacific Studies to host an author and translator event with Japanese writer, Kaori Fujino and translator, Kendall Heitzman at Kinokuniya New York 4/24! They discussed her 2013 Akutagawa Prize-winning and newly translated novel, Nails and Eyes, had time for Q & A, and an autograph session!
Watch the author event video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJEBcUN01kQ
About the author:
Kaori Fujino, a lifelong resident of Kyoto, is best known for fiction that reimagines tropes from horror, science fiction, Hollywood thrillers, urban legends, fairy tales, and museum culture. She holds an MA in aesthetics and art from Doshisha University. In 2013, Fujino was awarded the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prominent literary prize, for Nails and Eyes. In the fall of 2017, she was in residence at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Her stories have appeared in English translation in Granta, Monkey, and the US-Japan Women's Journal.
About the translator
Kendall Heitzman is associate professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Iowa, where he teaches literature, film, theater, and the Japanese-to-English translation workshop. He is the author of Enduring Postwar: Yasuoka Shōtarō and Literary Memory in Japan (Vanderbilt University Press, 2019). His translations of Furukawa Hideo appear in recent issues of the literary journal Monkey. His translation of Fujino Kaori’s Nails and Eyes (Pushkin Press, 2023) received the Japan-US Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.
Synopsis:
A young girl loses her mother, and her father blindly invites his secret lover into the family home to care for her. Obsessively trying to curate a pristine life, this new interloper remains indifferent to the girl, who seems to record her every move – and she realizes only too late all that she has failed to see.
With masterful narrative control, Nails and Eyes—appearing in English for the first time—builds to a conclusion of disturbing power. Paired with two additional stories of unsettled minds and creeping tension, it introduces a daring new voice in Japanese literature.